CLARA CLAUSBRICK BLOOM CATCH

Music by Joakim, Emilie Weibel and Nikhil ShahCurated by Marie Salome Peyronnel

Specially created for The Chimney, Brick Bloom Catch is part of Clara Claus ongoing exploration of possible dialogues between music and visual arts. She will perform a three-parts piece with three musicians – Joakim, Emilie Weibel and Nikhil Shah - in her installation of wooden modules leaning on the brick wall of The Chimney. The three musicians’ performances will mark the “before-now-after” of Clara’s live-painting intervention in the installation.

video session #1

KIRAN CHANDRA SPACESCAPE

A family on a road trip, a description of the floating proteins in our eyes,a formerly occupied building in disarray, in an attempt to talk about the universe. Kiran Chandra's work is girded by language and meaning. The intersection between the written and the spoken, the received and the created, and the remembered the forgottenare thematic touchstones in many of her pieces.

ANDREW ERDOS VANISHING POINT

"The very idea of the millions and hundreds of millions years that were needed peacefully to ravage the surface of the earth here is a perverse one, since it brings with it an awareness of signs originating long before man appeared, in a sort of pact of wear and erosion struck between the elements. Among this gigantic heap of signs - purely geological in essence - man will have had no significance." - Jean Baudrillard, America, 1986

Anne-Charlotte Finel captures the texture of the water and the sky and triggers viewers’ imagination towards unknown and enigmatic territories. Both hypnotizing and surprising, the fleeting images appear as fragments of transitory and elusive spaces. The speed, movements and jumps of the camera turn the lunar landscape into humming and trembling planets, on the verge of exploding.

BRODBECK & DE BARBUAT DU CIEL À LA TERRE

Du Ciel à la Terre is a short video taking the shape of a poem, symbolizing the journey of a spirit from the Sky to the Earth; from a life to another. Beginning in the immaterial sky, the camera initiates a slow descent towards the Earth.The long travelling through the city is interwoven with images of nature and contemplation where the soul wanders between two worlds.

SILENT WORLD

The project finds its origins in the early years of Photography, when «Boulevard du temple», Louis Daguerre’s 1838 photograph, showed an apparently empty street where just a shoe-shine was still visible. The camera slowly comes down from the sky to discover the Place de l’Opéra in Paris empty and silent. Human activity has disappeared.Only a woman brakes the silence finding herself roaming on the streets.The project tries to bring together what exists and what the imagination can project on our world, what we can see and what we can not. An interior representation, serene and silent.

LUCY KERRThe Light was there but then it left

Music by Jeremy Slater

Sculpture by Sophie Frost

Curated by Adriana Pauly

The Light Was There But Then It Left plays on a multiplicity of realities through the layering of video and live performance. The mirrored movements of the dancers and the projection destabilize the present and the similar but different movements present an alternate, an Other. “The projection of the figures in the forest becomes an image of what could be, what once was, or what is possible.” Cut in and out of the projection, a phantasmagorical reflection visualizes the poetics of absence. The dancers become dreamlike and overlap the surreal with the real. The video becomes a window into another space, where the movement of frames mimic the in and out of different relationships. The viewer is invited to look into the window at a diorama of figures and landscapes that are captured in time in a moment of transition.

video session #2

LIZZY DE VITA THE QUESTION OF FORGIVING RICHARD SERRA

De Vita filmed herself in a standard interview attire and format. It reads plain, but the process is complex and layered, starting with an object – the unpublished error-ridden transcript of an interview with Richard Serra done in Pittsburgh in 1985 after he had installed his large outdoor piece Carnegie, a piece that de Vita grew up with. She edited out the interview questions, and with the camera running, read the Serra portion of the transcript aloud until she could do so seamlessly, trying to possess each word as her own, even those which had been mis-typed by an invisible third party transcriber. The process of inhabiting Serra's (often misheard) words with her voice and body is a different take on the phenomenological inhabiting of space that his work aims for. It is meant to be shamanistic (“The Question” refers not only to the process but to a comic superhero who is a faceless shaman figure); and “forgiving” not necessarily in the sense of excusing wrongdoing but of extending human sympathy beyond the limits of our own minds/bodies.

CRISTOBAL CEA GHOST OF CONCORDIA (THE CHIMNEY NYC)

What happens to events that occur far away, in towns that were once deemed newsworthy and are now seemingly forgotten such as the flood of Concordia in 2015? Events protagonized by people that suddenly appeared on screens all over the world and – and are now decontextualized, deprecated, forgotten. The result of Ghost of Concordia is a shared gaze: The digital reconstruction and documentation of an environment that you can’t find on Google Maps, the captured motion of people –now digital Ghosts- that were once global and are now nowhere to be found, surrounded by virtual artifacts that called Cea's attention for their ambiguity within the narrative of the newsreel.

CONSTANZA ALARCON TENNENTHE WITNESSES

The Witnesses is a video inspired in the relation between Ahmad Shamloo, and Victor Jara. Shamloo, Iranian poet, and Jara, Chilean songwriter and poet, probably never met. Shamloo came to Jara by grace, or because there was something in the History and the lyrics of the Chilean that resounded with what was happening in Iran in the 70s. The Witnesses is an exercise of fiction in which History is re-imagined and constructed. From a poetic narration where geology and politics are intertwined, the voices of the poets are united, through sound, with an Earth that perceives the violent outcomes that characterized the decade of 1970, imagining a different History and future of Chile and Iran.

LETTER TO S.

"Dear Friend, Where are you? I can't see you anymore. Far seem the days that we sat peacefully and carelessly."

SHAHRZAD CHANGALVAEETHAT'S NOT ALL (JARA-SHAMLOU)

That's Not All is a video inspired by the relation between Ahmad Shamlou, Iranian poet and Victor Jara, Chilian songwriter and poet. Through a collage of found footages and filmed ones, the video narrates a fictional history-responsive moment: Shamlou and Jara meet and have a coffee together. This desirable moment is empowered by their strong words which have trembled two volcano's in Chile and Iran. Dramatized by the reality, the video suggests an alternative narrative where the two free poets meet, laugh and celebrate an alternative triumph.

ANAHITA RAZMI - Presented by Carbon 12, DubaiHERE SCRIPTS

Here Scripts involves a Moroccan offsite, the Atlas Studios in Ouarzazate, as the shooting location for the video work. Atlas Studios is a film studio located about 200 km from Marrakech - measured by acreage, it is the world's largest film studio. Films that have used the services of the studio include "The Jewel of the Nile", "The Mummy", "Gladiator", "Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra", "Babel", as well as episodes of "Game of Thrones". Here Scripts extracts script lines from movies that were shot at Atlas Studios, which contain statements about the actual site or specific context the movie plot was set in. Taken out of their plot context and erasing the former narration, Here Scripts puts these extracted lines into new connections with the site of the Atlas Studios, quoting filmic descriptions of "The Other"/ "Oriental“ sites, settings and people, while re-using the film sets and their tangible construction for a newly scripted, fragmented story of the site. Representational values and equations are dismantled and statements are dropped into uncertainty: Who is the narrator / that speaks / from where / about what / to whom? Can the location, based on its film history, script for itself? Working as a video mashup, Here Scripts is juggling notions of place and context, onsite vs offsite, narration vs construction, here vs elsewhere.

AAAAAAAAAAH

The video AAAAAAAAAAAH is sampling a selection of cut-up audio tracks appropriated from pop songs and Islamic azans, that both use the line “AAAAAAAAAAAH” as part of their melodic structure. Within the azan (call to prayer), “AAAAAAAAAAAH” is leading to the word “Allah”, the lengthening of the words and sounds by the singer/muezzin is a variable characteristic. In pop music “AAAAAAAAAAAH” links to various random refrains, intermediate melodies and musical bridges. The video is merging different audio AAAH-extracts - now abstract artifacts - while a hardly determinable figure wearing a black sequin dress is performing body movements to the melodies. The black sparkling are sometimes emerging from, sometimes blending into a black background; differences and similarities are alternating on both sound and visual levels.

Clara Claus (b. 1985, Banyuls sur mer, France) completed her BFA at Cooper Union (2012). Claus' work was featured in notable solo and group exhibitions including Amble Timbre (2016), at The Hollows, Brooklyn, USA, MOTIF (2016) at the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic zeros COLLECTIVE pop-up in Los Angeles, USA, La Main Qui Dessinait Toute Seule (2015) at the gallery Magda Danysz in Paris, FRANCE, Fils de Fragments in Chateau Royal, Collioure, FRANCE (2015), Fragment of a Leap, at Basu Foundation, Kolkata, India (2015) and Graphic Score for BAM at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, USA (2013)Claus has been awarded artist residencies at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, USA (2015), Basu Foundation, Kolkata, India (2015), and Yale Norfolk School of Art, CT, USA (2011). She was received the Elliott Lash memorial Prize in Sculpture from Cooper Union (2012) and was the recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Trust Grant from Yale Univeristy (2011).

Joakim is one of France foremost electronic composer, the Brooklyn based artist is also an outstanding DJ, a high-profile remixer (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Air…), a forward thinking label owner (Tigersushi, Crowdspacer) and even a self-taught graphic designer which makes this former piano student at the Conservatory a very unique and complete creative, quite impossible to pinpoint, and whose vision of music is global. His first steps into contemporary art have been successful, working on Camille Henrot’s installations and videos (who won the Silver Lion at the 2013 Venice Biennale with the video Grosse Fatigue) or making sound installations (Gwangju Biennale in 2014 curated by Jessica Morgan).

Emilie Weibel : With a background in Jazz and improvisation, and a formation in classical voice with Janet Steel, the Brooklynite Swiss vocalist and composer has released her debut album oMoO in May 2014. About this experimental project The Village Voice says « Emily is the subtle songbird with an equally mesmerizing presence and DIY ethos. » and praises the minimalist vocal magic she creates.

Nikhil Shah is a collage artist working in film and sound. Equal parts casual voyeur and jester, his work aims squarely at teasing the absurd practices of modern life

Marie Salomé Peyronnel is a published writer and curator. She met Clara Claus during Claus' artist residency at Pioneer Works. In 2016, she presented Claus' pyramids and drawings at SPRING/BREAK art show alongside works by six other French artists. This year, Peyronnel has also curated a performance by Pauline Guerrier and Basile Narcy (Dans un instant, March 2016) and a show by Radouan Zeghidour at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery (Hypogea, April 2016). Originally from from Paris, France, she currently lives in New York.

Kiran Chandra earned an Honors BA from St. Stephen’s College of Delhi University, a BFA from Lesley University’s Art Institute of Boston and an MFA from Hunter College. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad, including The Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, NY; Momenta Art and Bogart Salon, Brooklyn, NY; Underdonk, Brooklyn, NY; Project 88, Mumbai, India; Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi, India; Ganges Art Gallery, Kolkata, India. She has been awarded a Cisneros Scholarship, a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship and a Women’s Edge Award, among other prizes. Residencies include SOMA Summer International Program, Mexico City, Mexico; Studio Arts Center, Florence, Italy; The Cooper Union’s Summer Art Intensive, New York, NY. Chandra is the co-founder of Temporary Agency, an artist-run, alternative space. She lives and works in New York.

Andrew Erdos (b. 1985) graduated with a BFA from Alfred University. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York, with Invaluable (2015) and Guaranteed Impermanence (2013). The youngest recipient of the Rakow Commission of the Corning Museum of Glass, his work has been exhibited worldwide and throughout the United States. Notable group exhibitions include Incantations: The Modern Cave (2016), The Chimney NYC, Brooklyn, NY; Piece by Piece (2015), the Kemper Art Museum, Kansas City; Glass Today: 21st Century Innovations (2014), the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass (2014), Knoxville Museum of Art; Color Ignited: Glass 1962-2012 (2012), Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Cyberfest (2009), The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia; Art Parade (2008),Deitch Projects, New York; Insatiable Streams (2007), Beijing BS1 Contemporary Art Center, Beijing, China. Erdos’ work can be found in the permanent collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art; the Toledo Museum of Art; the Knoxville Museum of Art; the Corning Museum of Glass; the 21c Museum in Durham, and the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison. Andrew Erdos lives and works in New York City.

Brodbeck & de Barbuat, are a French duo of artists working with video, photography and installation since 2005. They have exhibited in solo and group shows in France and abroad, including the FoMu, Museum of Photography Antwerpen, Belgium; The French Institute, Osaka, Japan; La Maison de la Photographie, Lille, France; Venice Arsenale, Arte Laguna Awards, Italy; Le Grand Palais, Paris, France; The Palais Royal Gardens, Paris, France; Le Carreau du Temple, Paris, France; The Kunsthalle Munich, Germany; The Thessaloniki Museum for Photography, Greece; La Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; Le Centquatre, Paris; Arles International Photography Festival, France; La Vieille Charité, Marseille, France; Le festival des arts visuels de Vevey, Switzerland; Kowall+Oddermat project space, Miami, USA; 798 District, Beijing, China. They have been nominated as fellows of the Villa Medicis, French Academy in Rome for 2016-2017. Recipient of the HSBC award for Photography in 2010, they were awarded the Prix Jeune création 2013, the Grand Prix international de la photographie de Vevey, and the Prix de la bourse du talent in 2009. Brodbeck & de Barbuat live and work in Paris.

Lucy Kerr (b.1990, Houston, Texas) is a choreographer, experimental filmmaker, performance and installation artist, and writer. Kerr graduated with a BA in Philosophy and Dance from The University of Texas at Austin and was the grand prize winner of the 2014 Co-op/George H. Mitchell Awards for Academic Excellence for her Philosophy and Dance Studies thesis. Kerr was selected as a 2014-2016 LEIMAY Fellow in Brooklyn, NY. Her films have been screened by Mono No Aware, Dance Films Associations, and New Filmmakers at Anthology Film Archives. Kerr’s interdisciplinary performance and installation work has been presented at IDIO Gallery, Co-Lab Projects (Austin, TX), and CAVE home of LEIMAY. Kerr is currently working on an evening-length film and performance piece that is being co-commissioned by Mono No Aware and The Center for Performance Research for Fall 2016. Kerr recently worked as the writer for LEIMAY’s publication accompanying the production of ‘borders’ at BAM. Her publications, merging philosophy, film, and performance theory have been used as coursework at UCLA. Kerr lives and works in New York.

Sophie Frost (b.1992, Anchorage, Alaska) graduated from The Pratt Institute (2015) with a BA in Critical & Visual Studies. This major allows its student to customize their studies, in which Frost focused on ceramic sculpture, cinema studies, and gender studies. Frost’s work is repetitious which allows for a fine-tuning of its process. The patterns in nature and manmade structures inspire the shapes that together form each piece. Her work has been featured at The Outer Room Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, and is part of an upcoming showcase with RAW Artists at the Warsaw in Brooklyn, NY.

Jeremy D. Slater (b. 1966, Reading, England) is a multi-disciplinary artist working in the areas of sound, video, computer art, performance, and installation. Slater holds a BA from SUNY College at Buffalo and School of Visual Arts with an MFA in Computer Art. Slater performs as ( ) and is a member of ROTC (Rubaiyats of the Cicadas), Frogwell, tu, EMP, and Plan 23. He is currently curator of "sonic front" at Front Room Gallery, a series exploring electroacoustic improvisation, electronic music, and sound art. He curated numerous performance events and gallery shows in New York including “A Sound Show” at Front Room Gallery, the sound/video performance series “kere.u” and “FLOW”, “Sun Khronos” at Millennium Film Workshop, and “Video as an Instrument” at The Tank and Supreme Trading Gallery. Jeremy Slater was one of the 1999 recipients of the Computer Art Fellowship from New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) and has attended the Experimental Television Residency, was guest musician at Watermill Center and HERE with Cave/Leimay, and was artist in residence at Seoul Art SpaceGeumcheon in Seoul, South Korea.

Adriana Pauly is an independent curator and art writer from Germany. In her curatorial as well as her writing projects she esteems to promote art made by female artists as well as harboring a special interest in Latin American art. Missy Magazine in Germany, Autre magazine and now Artreport have published her writing.

Lizzy de Vita (b. 1986, New York, USA) received a BA from Barnard College in English Literature and Art History, and more recently an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art. De Vita's work was the subject of several solo exhibitions including most recently “The Sky Too Dreams Of Rest” (2016), The Chimney NYC, New York, USA. She has exhibited works in many venues both nationally and internationally, including The Andy Warhol Museum, The Invisible Dog, Re-Exhibitions, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Screen_, No Longer Empty (Concrete Utopia) and The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. She has been invited to participate in residencies at the Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw, Poland) and Arts Cabinet (forthcoming, London, UK). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Anahita Razmi (b. 1981, Hamburg, Germany) completed her MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart (2009). Razmi’s work was included at the 56th Venice Bienniale in “Silk Map” (2013). She has been awarded several prizes, such as The Emdash Award, Frieze Foundation in 2011, Cité Internationale Des Arts, Paris in 2014, Production Grant, Kulturverwaltung Des Berliner Senats in 2015 and Cultural Exchange Scholarship, Istanbul in 2016 to name a few. She also has been received artist residencies at the Reutlingen in Szolnok, Hungary in 2010; Goethe Institute’s Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto, Japan in 2015; Kunststiftung Erich Hauser in Rottweil, Germany in 2015 among others. Razmi’s work has been featured in several solo exhibitions, “Bellydancing 12.000.000 views This Girl She is insane ! Subscribe !!!" (2016), Galerie Karin Sachs, Munich; “Sharghzadegi" (2015), Carbon 12, Dubai; “Do Fard” (2015), Uqbar, Berlin; “Swing State” (2013), Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken and Kunstverein Hannover, Germany; “Frischzelle 17" (2012), Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany, “Make – Believe– Remake” (2011) and Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, Germany. She has exhibited in group exhibition in many venues, such as Baden-Baden, Germany (2016); Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2016); Marrakech Biennale / Parallel Project", Marrakech (2016); Amoca: The Arab Museum Of Contemporary Art, Sakhnin, Israel (2015); Goethe-Institut, Paris (2015); Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain, Brussels (2014); 55th Venice Biennial – Padiglione Venezia (2013) and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2008). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany as well as several private collections, notably, The Farook Collection, Dubai; The Farjam Collection, Dubai, SPM: Salsali Private Museum, Dubai and Davis Museum At Wellesley College, USA. Razmi works and lives in Berlin.

Cristobal Cea (b.1981, Santiago, Chile) holds a BA from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Chile and an MFA in Digital Media from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he taught at the Film Animation and Film department. His work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions at Microscope Gallery, BRIC Arts Media, Brooklyn, NY; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin, MI; 789 Art District, Beijing, China; Galería Concreta, Santiago, Chile; Cave Space, Detroit, MI, and the RISD Digital + Media Biennial 2012, Providence, RI, among others. Cea has been awarded the Fulbright Scholarship (U.S.A.), the RISD Bridge Research Grant, the National Council for the Arts Grant (Chile), the RISD President Scholarship (U.S.A), and the first prize of the Matilde Perez’s “Art and Digital Technologies” Competition. He is also a recipient of the MacDowell Colony Fellowship and his drawing series “Big Data” is part of the Deutsche Bank drawing collection. He is currently a faculty member at NYU’s Integrated Digital Media program. Cristobal Cea lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Constanza Alarcón Tennen (b.1986, Santiago, Chile) is a multidisciplinary artist. Her work varies between sound installations, videos and sculptures, among others. She graduated from Universidad Católica de Chile (BFA 2009) and from Yale University (MFA 2015). Alarcon Tennen has participated in the Creating through collaboration; Space, Body, Camera workshopat the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland and is currently an artist in residence at the Bronx Museum's AIM program. She is part of an Art Collective called Grupo < >, an organization of women artists of Latin American descent.Her work has been shown internationally in groups and solo exhibitions such as “Futre remnants of a missing word” (2016), Meyohas, NY; “Exhibition of collective Grupo < >” (2016), Experimental Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca; Migratorry Patterns (2015), 56 Bogart,Brooklyn; Time Item (2015), Green Gallery, New Haven; Y sin embargo se mueve (2012), Die Ecke Gallery, Santiago, Chile; among others.She received the Susan H. Whedon Award for outstanding student in Sculpture at Yale University (New Haven, 2015), a CONICYT Scholarship (Santiago, 2013) and a FONDART grant (Santiago, 2012). Alarcon Tennen lives and works between Santiago and Brooklyn, NY.